After the second day of oral arguments went quite badly for the Obama administration, Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid argued that a supreme court decision finding the president's healthcare law unconstitutional would be a political benefit to his party. "There's a significant school of thought that the administration is – puts them in a better position for the election if it's turned down," Reid told reporters Tuesday.

One can forgive a bit of wishful thinking on Reid's part, but the fact remains that a supreme court decision repealing "Obamacare" would not good news for the Democrats and it would not be good news for Barack Obama's re-election chances. To believe that nullifying the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would somehow trigger a new level of enthusiasm among Obama's base, you would have to believe that right now, there is a certain amount of complacency about re-electing the president among Democrats.

You would have to believe that there are certain voters out there who are currently not planning on voting – either at all, or to re-elect the president – because the ACA has passed, but that these voters will vote for him if it is declared unconstitutional by the court. This is extremely unlikely.

If you are a loyal Democrat, you are extremely likely to show up and vote to re-elect president Obama in November, no matter how the court rules. If you are a liberal, you are roughly as likely, if for no other reason than to deter a Republican presidency. Voters in these categories voted for Obama four years ago because they believed in him. No matter how many times he may have frustrated or disappointed these voters since taking office, the overwhelming majority of them are not going to let the first African-American president in US history and the most effective salesman for progressive politics in a generation be limited to one term.

So, Democrats are going to turn out for Obama, either way. The bigger question is independents, and they have never liked "Obamacare"; in fact, independents' attitudes have proven remarkably stable. Shortly after it passed, Gallup found 54% thought its passage was a "bad thing" and 43% thought it was a "good thing". After the 2010 midterms, Gallup found 43% of independents thought the bill "goes too far", while 19% thought it was "about right" and 27% felt it "didn't go far enough". Last week, a CNN poll found 53% of independents opposed it; 41% favored it.

It is an article of faith among the administration, congressional Democrats, and many liberals that, at some point, the public as a whole would learn to love the healthcare law. It hasn't happened yet. There is little reason to believe that it will happen.

Theoretically, a Democrat grasping for a silver lining could argue that overturning the ACA removes an albatross from around the president's neck. But it still makes for an awkward and implausible rallying cry for the president among independents: "Now that the law we hated is nullified, let's vote for the guy who signed it into law.'

The biggest problem for Obama is that most Americans share his initial reaction to the notion of the individual mandate – deep skepticism that a law requiring people either buy health insurance or pay financial penalties to the government is really improving matters. This was one of the biggest policy differences between Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary, and Obama's scoffing at the mandate proved to be an applause line during those debates.

Fast forward a year, and Obama's advisers persuaded him that the individual mandate was necessary in order to make the finances of the entire reform work. Insurers will go broke if they're required to cover every sick person with large healthcare expenses, but don't get to collect premiums from healthy people with low large healthcare expenses. But this argument has never proven persuasive to the American people; most voters don't really care about the financial health of insurers.

What Americans do instinctively react to is any sentence that begins "the federal government is going to require you to", in almost any circumstance. On a fundamental level, many Americans hate being told what to do: pay a fee, fill out forms, stand in line, take off their shoes at the airport, eat this and not that, register your guns, seek approval from the zoning board. Incredulous liberals can't believe that voter disapproval on the ACA centers so heavily on the requirement to purchase health insurance, something that they consider to be objectively good (few would disagree) and that they think everyone wants or should have.

But they glide over the words, "requirement to purchase". Particularly during a lingering time of economic hardship, it's baffling that the administration didn't foresee popular opposition to an argument that Americans are best helped by a law that fines them for not buying something.

If "Obamacare" is overturned, the prospects for passage of a similar proposal even without the mandate provision are slim, at least for the next few years. The ACA passed at a time of historic Democratic majorities in the House and Senate; a Republican House would be extremely unlikely to pass either single-payer or anything resembling this healthcare law. After the most recent round of redistricting, the Democratic odds of winning the 25 seats necessary to make Nancy Pelosi the speaker again are slim, though not impossible. (The retirements of five House Democrats in heavily-GOP leaning seats in North Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Indiana suggest that Democrats will really need to flip 30 seats in the upcoming election to regain control.)

The Democrats who remain in the House saw how the healthcare law vote doomed so many of their colleagues in swing districts in 2010, and they won't be eager to run the gauntlet again. To change the risk and tension around this issue, Obama would need to fundamentally alter the political environment – something on par with his electoral college landslide in 2008.

If a crucial element of the healthcare reform law that is known by his name is nullified by the court, Obama would head into his re-election battle with an unemployment level that has dropped some but remains high by historical standards (8.3%), a still-struggling housing market, high gas prices, stagnant wages, consumer confidence levels still extremely low by historical standards. Facing the traditional question of challengers to incumbents – "are you better-off now than four years ago?" Obama is likely to face a tougher issue environment than confronted Jimmy Carter in 1980 or George HW Bush in 1992.

Obama and his campaign will do their best to argue that whatever the lingering frustrations of the past few years, his opposition – most likely, Mitt Romney – would make things worse. Thus, Americans should stick with the devil they know, over the devil they don't. It might work. But the task is much, much tougher than the one Obama and his campaign faced in 2008.